Author: Billy Tetrud 2022-04-28 16:35:32
Published on: 2022-04-28T16:35:32+00:00
The conversation between @Zman, @Nadav, and Billy Tetrud centers around the concept of rationality and consensus in decision-making for Bitcoin. While @Zman believes that two perfectly rational people will agree if they start with the same information, @Nadav disagrees due to different individual goals. Billy Tetrud suggests coming to a consensus around goals to streamline conversations and share ideas. They discuss the cost attached to voting and the advantage custodians have due to holding people’s funds. Additionally, they talk about the representation of different constituencies in the threshold for activating consensus change.Billy Tetrud proposes that a group's representation should be based on their stake in bitcoin and the value they provide to bitcoin. He divides the representation into four groups: holders, transactors, miners, and developers. Lastly, they discuss the tests to measure levels of support directly and suggest mechanisms such as coin-weighted polling, transaction signaling, and miner signaling. However, they also talk about the limitations of measurements and how they can be gamed. The transaction signaling can be gamed a bit, but miner signaling doesn't seem gameable. Developer consensus is probably the most gameable. They discuss relying on experts in this way being an enormous attack vector and how we should move away from appeals to authority towards something more amorphous and difficult to control. They also talk about the preferences of stakeholders must be weighed and a compromise come to. They believe that the truth gets out eventually. They propose a polling structure that isn't programmatically connected to activation. The intention is for people (developers) to look at the polling results and make an educated analysis of it as far as how it should contribute to consensus gathering. Similar structures could be added to any script configuration to allow signing of polls without any significant exposure. However, it doesn't address the issue of what about people who don't know there's a vote going on or other social issues with "weighted polling" in general, like how nonexperts can "have a say" when they simply don't understand the relevant issues. The discussion revolves around the idea of coming to a consensus in a structured way. They suggest getting rough measures of consensus by gathering explicit reviews on a proposal, where opinions like "I don't like it" or "This is great, let's do it!" would count for very little. Reviews that look into a particular section deeply or review the broad idea as a whole would count a bit more, and reviews that discuss many good points and reasons about a large fraction of the proposal would carry even more weight.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T19:48:00.932131+00:00